John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Coauthored

Has coauthors

  • Florence Kelley and the Struggle Against the Degradation of Life: An Introduction to a Selection from Modern Industry

    “Florence Kelley and the Struggle Against the Degradation of Life: An Introduction to a Selection from Modern Industry” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 19, no 2 (June 2006), 1-13. DOI: 10.1177/1086026606288224

    Florence Kelley illuminated how degraded environments stemmed from the social relations and operations of industrial capitalism. As a social reformer, she worked to document the various dangers that workers confronted. She presented how laborers were exposed to noxious gases, toxic substances, and poisonous chemicals and dyes. Dangerous materials, such as arsenic, were introduced into the production process without a concern for their health implications. Kelley’s critique of industrial capitalism and its exploitation of workers, especially in the form of child labor, revealed how a productive process driven by the accumu- lation of capital threatened the health of all people and hindered social development. She fought to make the public aware of the dangerous materials and hazardous conditions that were involved in the production of items for market. Kelley worked to unite consumers and laborers in a campaign to improve industrial relations, recognizing that a radical transformation of social relations was necessary in order to stop the degradation of life.

  • Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth

    “Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth,” [PDF], Theory and Society, vol. 35, no. 1 (February 2006), pp. 109-56. DOI: 10.1007/s11186-006-6781-2.

    Until recently, most commentators, including ecological Marxists, have assumed that Marx’s historical materialism was only marginally ecologically sensitive at best, or even that it was explicitly anti-ecological. However, research over the last decade has demonstrated not only that Marx deemed ecological materialism essential to the critique of political economy and to investigations into socialism, but also that his treatment of the coevolution of nature and society was in many ways the most sophisticated to be put forth by any social theorist prior to the late twentieth century.

    Translations:
    • German translation in Prokla 159 (June 2010), pp. 217-40 (Part 1), (Part 2) in Prokla 160 (September 2010), pp. 417-36.

  • The Great Financial Crisis

    “The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On,” (coauthored with Fred Magdoff), Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 5 (October 2010), pp. 52-55. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-05-2010-09_5

    The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world. Austerity is being forced on working people in many countries. Matters are especially difficult in Greece, a country that is being compelled by the demands of bankers, including the International Monetary Fund, to squeeze its workers in return for loans from abroad to help pay down government debts. Official unemployment in the United States is still around 10 percent, and real unemployment is much higher. An unprecedented 44 percent of the officially unemployed have been without work for over six months. A record number of people are receiving government food assistance as well as meals and groceries from charities. Many U.S. states and cities, facing large shortfalls in their budgets due to falling tax revenues, are cutting jobs and reducing funding for schools and social programs.

    Translations:
    • English language version of preface to the Bangla edition of The Great Financial Crisis.
    • Spanish translation by Alberto Nadal in Viento Sur, November 11, 2010.
    • Spanish language translation by Alberto Nadal in El Diario Internacional (December 2010).
    • Italian version published by Attac Italia, January 7, 2011, at http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525.
    • French translation printed by Le Comité pour l’Annulation de la Dette du Tiers Monde, December 29, 2010.
    • Galician translation published by Avantar, December 21, 2010, http://www.galizacig.com/avantar/autor/john-bellamy-foster-e-fred-magdoff.
    • Catalan translation published by En Lluita, http://www.enlluita.org/site/?q=node/3150.
    • Turkish translation appears in Kapitalizmin Finansal Krizi, edited by Prof. Dr. Abdullah Ersoy (Ankara, Turkey: Imaj Publishing, 2011), 330pp.

     

  • The Treadmill of Production: Extension, Refinement and Critique

    ”The Treadmill of Production: Extension, Refinement and Critique,” [PDF] (coauthored with Richard York, York listed first – special issue on ‘the treadmill of production, part II’), Organization and Environment, vol. 18, no. 1 (March 2005), pp. 5-6. DOI: 10.1177/1086026604270325

    Philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1978) argued that the key to evaluating merit in the sciences lies in the distinction between progressive and degenerative research programs. A research program is progressive if its theoretical growth anticipates its empirical growth (i.e., if it predicts novel facts with some frequency rather than merely explaining facts discovered by rival research pro- grams). In contrast, degenerative research programs are those whose theoretical development lags behind their empirical development. Needless to say, a research program may switch between these two states at different periods in time. This part of the special issue is focused on Schnaiberg’s (1980) “Treadmill of Production” (ToP), in environmental sociology and presents articles that implicitly explore the extent to which the (ToP) research program has been progressive and has the potential to be progressive in the coming years by providing novel insights into emerging phenomena. Whether the program ultimately proves to be progressive or degenera- tive remains to be seen, but it is indisputable that the (ToP) is one of the leading theoretical perspectives in environmental sociology and is at the center of most major contemporary debates in the subdiscipline.

     

  • Empire of Barbarism

    Empire of Barbarism

    “Empire of Barbarism,” coauthored with Brett Clark (Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 56, no. 7 (December 2004), pp. 1-15. DOI: 10.14452/MR-056-07-2004-11_1

    “A new age of barbarism is upon us.” These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, and Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the killing of hundreds on a Spanish commuter train and hundreds more in Bali, Business Week declared: “America, Europe, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and governments everywhere are under attack by Islamic extremists. These terrorists have but one demand—the destruction of modern secular society.” Western civilization was portrayed as standing in opposition to the barbarians, who desire to destroy what is assumed to be the pinnacle of social evolution.

    Translations:
    • Original published version appeared in Portuguese translation in Commnicações, vol. 1, Civilização ou Barbárie (Serpa, Portugal: Encontro Internacional, September 2004), pp. 46-53.
    • German translation in Utopiekreativ: Diskussion Sozialistischer Alternativen, June 2005, vol. 176, 491-503;
    • Spanish translation in Marx Ahora (Cuba), no. 19 (2005), 7-19.
    • Polish translation in Rewolucja, no. 4, 2006.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 9 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2006).
    • Japanese translation, February 1, 2005, at http://www.ne.jp/asahi/institute/association/old/newsletter/20050201/article_2.htm.

     

  • Political Economy and the Environmental Crisis: Introduction to Special Issue

    “Political Economy and the Environmental Crisis: Introduction to Special Issue” [PDF] (co-authored with Richard York, Foster listed first—special issue on the treadmill of production, part I), vol. 17, no. 3 (September 2004), pp. 293-95. DOI: 10.1177/1086026604268016

    According to Frederick Buell (2003) in his book ‘From Apocalypse to Way of Life‘, perceptions of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s were both narrower in scope and more apocalyptic (usually Malthusian) in tone than those of today. Rather than diminishing, the problem of the environment has only expanded in the years since Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring‘, was published. Severe environmental crisis is no longer foreign to us—not some future to be feared and avoided so much as a present in which we are living. It has become a structural reality of modern life and accepted as such, even normalized. If anything, a certain fatalism has emerged. It is now increasingly understood by environmental sociologists and many others that global ecological degradation is at the core of the development of modern (particularly capitalist) forms of production and is inescapable as long as those relations of production remain unaltered. Proba- bly the earliest analyst to articulate such a structural view through a fully developed political-economic theory of environmental degradation under corporate capitalism was Allan Schnaiberg (1980) in his magnum opus, ‘The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity‘. It was here that Schnaiberg introduced the important concept of the treadmill of production—the topic taken up in this special issue. Schnaiberg rejected all apocalyptic notions, believing that something could be done if social relations could be radically transformed, yet his indictment of our present system of production for its degradation of the environment was all the more damning as a result.

  • The American Empire

    “The American Empire: Pax Americana or Pox Americana?,” Monthly Review, vol. 56, no. 4 (September 2004), pp. 1-4. DOI: 10.14452/MR-056-04-2004-08_1

    From the Book: Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire

    “Editors’ Preface”

    On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., in which he declared that the peace that the United States sought was “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” His remarks were a response to criticisms of the United States advanced in a recently published Soviet text on military strategy. Kennedy dismissed the charge that “American imperialist circles” were “preparing to unleash different kinds of wars” including “preventative war.” The Soviet text, he pointed out, had stated, “The political aims of American imperialists were and still are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries and, after the latter are transformed into obedient tools, to unify them in various military-political blocs and groups directed against the socialist countries. The main aim of all this is to achieve world domination.” In Kennedy’s words, these were “wholly baseless and incredible claims,” the work of Marxist “propagandists.” “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”

    Translations:

     

  • Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism

    “Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism : The ”Podolinsky Business” Reconsidered,” [PDF], (coauthored with Paul Burkett, Foster listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 2004), pp. 32-60. DOI: 10.1177/1086026603262091

    This introduction to “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces” reassesses Sergei Podolinsky’s place in the history of ecological economics together with Marx and Engels’s reaction to Podolinsky’s work. The authors show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Podolinsky did not establish a plausible thermodynamic basis for the labor theory of value that could have been adopted by Marx and Engels. Moreover, Marx and Engels did not neglect nor abruptly reject Podolinsky’ s work as is commonly supposed but took it seriously enough to scrutinize it deeply in the spirit of critique. Although verifying Podolinsky’s right- ful place as a forerunner of ecological energetics, the authors’ analysis highlights the severe limitations imposed by his energy reductionism and closed-system thinking as compared to Marx and Engels’s metabolic and open-system approach.

    Reprint(s):

    Forthcoming reprint in Robert Ayres and Steve Keen, ed., Energy and Economic Theory (Northamption, MA: Edward Elgar, 2015.

  • Ecological Imperialism

    “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” (coauthored with Brett Clark), In Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, ed., The Socialist Register, 2004 (London: Merlin Press, 2004), pp. 230-46.

    Translations:
    • Catalan translation in Corrent Roig, June 6, 2010, http://www.correntroig.org.
    • Spanish translation in El Nuevo Desafío Imperial: Socialist Register 2004 (Clasco, February 2005).
    • Portugese translation in O Novo Desafio Imperial: Socialist Register 2004 (Sao Paolo, Brazil: Clasco, 2006).

  • Land, the Color Line and the Quest of the Silver Fleece: An Introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and The Quest of the Silver Fleece

    “Land, the Color Line and the Quest of the Silver Fleece: An Introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (selections),” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first) Organization and Environment, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 2003), 459-69.

    Manning Marable (1999) writes that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) “was without question the most influential black intellectual in American history” (p. v). Even more, he was a citizen of the world, gaining an international stature rarely achieved (Gates, 1989, p. xii). This year is the centennial of The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois, 1903/1989), in which Du Bois famously declared, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (p. xxxi). The color line divides people within the countryside, cities, and the globe. People of color are denied the same opportunities, privileges, and rights as Whites. During a life spanning 95 years, Du Bois’s scholarly work and commitment to activism were unsurpassed. He engaged in critical examinations of social and racial relations within the United States, as well as on the global level, always incorporating a rich historical context for situating his studies. Unfortunately, the relationship between human beings and nature, which was such a crucial part of his overall analysis, has received little attention.